4 The Price of Slippers

“Yama, I feel sick.”

“What’s wrong, Said? What would make you feel better?”

“If I have some meat, then I’ll feel a lot better.”

My father tells the story in the present tense, as if no time has elapsed between his childhood and this moment in Calgary. Time is fluid when you live in the intermediate state of exile and memory.

When her son said things like that, my grandmother would go out to the local store and buy some canned luncheon meat on credit. Young Said would wolf it down straight out of the can, closing his eyes in ecstasy. Sometimes he’d eat it so fast that he actually would feel sick. When he was a little older, he would occasionally get a treat so special that it came as a shock. The creamy sweetness of a ripe banana, or the rich, melting flavour of chocolate that lingers on your tongue. But that came even later.

When I was ten, I won a reading competition at school and was rewarded with a voucher for a three-pound bar of chocolate from World’s Finest. Eager and anxious, I looked for my prize in the mail every day, but it never arrived. I complained about the unfairness of it all, and that was when my father told me that he was about fifteen before he ever tasted chocolate. I still felt cheated, but not in the same way that he was.

When my father’s family arrived in Jordan, they were given tents and shown to land that had been set aside for refugees. In 1952, that informal settlement became known officially as Jabal el-Hussein. It was one of several refugee camps set up in Jordan in the wake of Al-Nakba by UNRWA—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Until he was six, my father’s home was a tent, where the family slept like tinned fish, huddled together for warmth, some kicking in their sleep, or crying out, or whimpering, “Still hungry, Yaba … Yama.” Whenever water leaked into the tent, someone would get up and try to find a sheet of plastic to pull over them. Or else everyone would move, grumbling, to another part of the tent that seemed a little drier.

As a young child, Said was carried around on his older brothers’ shoulders, and tossed from one to the other like a football. There were disagreements and fights, as in any family, but they were together—especially at night. They spent five years in that tent before they were able to get a house. Finally, they had four walls and some protection from the elements. But not from hunger. This was a time when the family had meat only once a week, a small piece for each of them. Dinner was more likely to be some combination of cooked vegetables, rice, bread, olive oil with cheese, all sprinkled with za’atar, a mixture of oregano and other herbs and roasted sesame seeds. Often, there wasn’t enough, and many nights Said and his family went to sleep with empty stomachs. “But we loved each other,” my father told me. “We all ate at the same time, when we had food, and we never fought over it.”

As he grew older, Said began to assert himself. He was the only one of the children who was constantly getting into trouble, sparking the stories of how his brothers brought back the wrong baby—a bad, naughty baby—from under the Nakba tree.

By the time my father was a teenager, the tents supplied by UNRWA when the first refugees arrived after the Nakba had given way to more permanent structures, mostly constructed by the refugees themselves, and with UNRWA contributing materials for roofing. Yet Jabal el-Hussein was still known as a refugee camp, and my father was deeply embarrassed when his better-off acquaintances found out where he lived. I have to cover up, he thought. I have to be someone I’m not, something better.

Throughout my father’s childhood, war was never far away. Said was aware of the activities of Palestinian resistance fighters, including the founding of Fatah and then of the Palestine Liberation Organization, but he had other things to think about. Often, he was more worried about his reputation than about the war zone in which he lived, so he would make sure that his friends picked him up somewhere else—away from the camp. He would make his way to a better neighbourhood on foot and stand casually in front of some nice-looking building, waiting for them to show up—trying to protect an identity fabricated by shame.

As he could seldom afford a taxi for the return trip home, my father would walk back to the refugee camp along the dirt roads, often in the rain. Along the way, he would be splashed by passing vehicles as they tried to take shortcuts. Seeing his muddy clothes and shoes, Grandma Nima would yell, “Not again! We just did the washing!” He always had the same excuse: He’d been play-fighting with his friends. She would click her tongue with frustration as he tracked mud across the floor. She tried hard to keep their simple home tidy, especially in case neighbours visited.

One day, he slipped and tore his only pair of pants. They could not be repaired, and his family had no money. He was forced to wear a pair of red pantaloons that belonged to one of his sisters for a week, until my grandfather was able to find a little extra cash to buy him a used pair of men’s trousers.

Although he was a bit of a rebel, my dad was intelligent and determined. Education was the only hope for any kind of future. There was something pushing him not to be left behind. At fourteen, he was working at Al-Shaksheer Pharmacy in downtown Amman, cleaning and helping the pharmacist. The owner noticed him and said, “You’re smart—why don’t you study to become a pharmacy assistant?”

My father enrolled at a local college in Amman and studied hard, earning his diploma in pharmacy at the age of nineteen. At the time in Amman, according to my father, there was no official college of pharmacy. His licence to practice pharmacy hangs in my office till this day. He walked about seven kilometres a day between school, work, and home. It was enough to put holes in shoes that were not durable to begin with, but he and his family learned to make sandals out of pieces of rubber cut from tires, bound together with string. His training at the college was intensive and demanding, but eventually Said became so skilled that he could manage the pharmacy himself, without the supervision of the pharmacist. Grandma Nima would say things like, “I never knew that the youngest one, the troublemaker, would do so well. I guess we got the right baby after all.”

Said’s achievements gave him a privileged position in his world. Although many of the people in the camp were accustomed to relying on folk remedies, such as maramia tea or coffee infused with roasted cumin, or bloodletting—still quite common tradition in Islamic culture—they started coming to him for help when they were sick or in need of medication. Many could not afford prescriptions or a consultation with a physician but Said could get medicines for free or at a cheaper rates through his work. My father never turned anyone away, and my grandfather Tuma was proud of him for that. “Here he is!” people in the camp would say when they saw him. “Come in, come in … drink some coffee.”

One day, a perfume company gave Said hundreds of samples to distribute to pharmacy customers. Instead, he took the samples to the refugee camp and handed them out to neighbours, friends, and family. He kept some of the samples for himself and poured them into a bucket so he could wash his feet in perfumed water. “I did this so I could feel, for a short time, that I was doing something I thought rich people would do,” he told me. For weeks, the fragrance of perfume mingled with the heavy odours of the camp.

My father remembered an earlier time, too, when another luxury arrived in the camp, “What is this sound? Where is it from?” People would gather, eager and curious. My dad and his brother Faisal had saved up to buy a radio, paying for it in instalments. “At night we listened to the Cairo radio station, knowing that we could go to jail if we were found out.” Egypt’s socialist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was no friend of monarchies, or of religious people, for that matter, and his growing popularity in the Arab world posed a threat to Jordan’s King Hussein, who was frequently criticized on Voice of the Arabs. The Cairo-based station broadcast throughout much of the Arab world, spreading Nasser’s calls for Arabic unity in the face of imperialism and messages of support for the liberation of Palestine. “We took a few risks,” Dad said in his understated manner, “and it helped the boredom to hear those distant voices.” A few risks—their curiosity could easily have landed them in prison.

Jabal el-Hussein was one of four refugee camps in Jordan. All of them were densely populated seas of makeshift tents filled with families fighting for some sort of life. The Jordanian government was working to bring sanitation, water, and electricity into these impoverished areas, which gradually evolved into urban villages. “There were always people like your grandfather and father,” Uncle Faisal told me, “trying to provide some extra food or money for those worse off. But there were also local drunkards, as well as thieves, cheats, and other criminals. It made it hard to raise a family in any normal way.”

Most of the stories about my family’s years in the El-Hussein camp came from Uncle Faisal. Until he passed away in 2006, he was like a second father to me, someone who could help me understand my father’s silences. He had an almost photographic memory and was near the top of his class in secondary school in Jordan. When he was young, he also wrote poems and stories, including one called Al-Fata Al Muazab (The Tormented Child), about a child living n a refugee camp. One of his poems, in which he praised King Hussein, was made into a song and played at a local radio station. “I had to write that poem,” he said. “After all, we could have been in trouble, your dad and me, listening to Cairo radio and insulting the king who had offered us safety.”

In another time and place, Uncle Faisal could have been a physician or scholar. But my grandfather sat him down one day and said, “Faisal, you are one of my most reliable sons. I need you to quit school to work and help the family.”

“Yes, Yaba. I understand.”

The school principal was terribly upset and came to the house to plead with Tuma to let Uncle Faisal continue his studies. But the family was growing and there were nine children to feed now. So my uncle began to apprentice as a carpenter. In 1960, when he was seventeen, Uncle Faisal went to Germany with his brother, my uncle Saleh, to work in a mine—contract jobs that paid well. This was a turning point in our family’s life. The money they sent home from Germany meant that my grandfather didn’t have to work as hard himself and could focus instead on building a new home. There were jokes about “Faisal the carpenter, helping build the house from a distance.” But, for my grandfather, it was another step away from memories of that leaky UNRWA tent.

When I travelled to Palestine in 2000, I made a trip to Amman to visit my relatives and to recover some of the memories I had of living there with my parents between 1985 and 1988, when I was still young. Originally built on seven hills, Amman had expanded rapidly during the second half of the twentieth century, opening its arms to waves of refugees from Palestine, Kuwait, and Iraq. More recently, they had come from Syria. A lot had happened since I had lived there, and my perspective was different.

I wandered through the souks and masjids of Al-Balad, the old downtown area that sits in a valley next to a hill called Jabal Amman. There on the hill, not far from the fancy shops, the cafés, clubs, and restaurants, and the elegant hotels that cluster around the main traffic circle, is the old refugee camp where thousands of Palestinians still live, many in conditions not much better than those in which my father’s family lived. One often finds these stark contrasts between rich and poor, and not only in the Middle East.

The El-Hussein camp is a congested ghetto filled with rundown, ramshackle houses jammed together in narrow, dirty lanes. The houses overflow with families, the roads are crowded, traffic gets snarled, and sometimes sewage runs down open ditches. Approaching Amman by air, you can spot the camp with ease by looking for the countless piles of bricks placed on top of flimsy roofs to prevent them from flying away in a strong wind. In the local markets, tiny neon-lit shops do their business beneath a naked forest of power poles and lines, many of which carry no electricity. Your senses can be overwhelmed by the noise and stench that is occasionally punctuated by the aroma of strong Arabic coffee, honey-laden sweets, and freshly baked flatbread.

In 2000, I was about the same age my father was when he was embarking on life as a pharmacy assistant. I’d visited El-Hussein several times already, but I had a special errand for which I needed my cousin Muhammad as a guide. Making our way through a maze of lanes, we found the house I was looking for. Muhammad and I knocked on the door and a young girl, about eight years old, opened it just a little and peered at us through the crack. She asked us who we were and what it was we wanted.

“My name is Mowafa Said Househ,” I said, “and I would like to see the place where my grandparents, uncles, and father once lived.” I had brought some groceries with me, which I handed to her.

Hesitantly, she accepted the gift. “Please can you wait?” She called her mother, who came to the door and asked the same questions her daughter had asked. I answered them again.

“Ahlan wa sahlan!” she said, smiling. “Welcome!”

I stepped inside at the invitation, but my cousin Muhammad hung back. It was obvious that he didn’t want to go in. The cramped single storey rowhouse house was built out of cement blocks around a small shared open courtyard where my father and his brothers had once played, just like I did growing up in Edmonton. But that was the end of the resemblance: it seemed impossible to bridge the gap between their reality and my own.

I looked around the tiny house and imagined Grandma Nima calling her husband and children to get ready for supper. My father had told me that they all ate from the same plate and often did not have enough—but that they shared what they had. My eyes burned as I thought of their life here. After ten minutes or so, I thanked the kind woman with more smiles and left. She would never know how much that visit meant to me or how strongly I felt a connection to my grandparents during that brief glimpse into their lives.

Muhammad and I continued to walk through the neighbourhood shops and markets, but I noticed that he was unusually quiet. At a shoe store, I looked at some slippers priced at two Jordanian dinars—about $3.50 at the time. Afterwards, we stopped for lunch at one of my favourite places, a kebab house called Inta Umri, where I already knew I could get the best kebabs and arayes in Mukhayyam el-Hussein. It was run by a family friend, Muhammad al-Dabash, who’d owned it for more than forty years. He had known my grandparents and my father. As hard as I tried over the days I was there, I could not get information from him. Today was no different. He kept deflecting my questions.

“I have come thousands of miles,” I persisted.

He waved me away. “Enjoy it! Enjoy it!” he urged, as he pushed the kebabs, arayes, and grilled vegetables over to me.

After Muhammad and I finished our lunch, we took a taxi to an upscale mall in downtown Amman. I could tell he was glad to be out of the refugee camp. Inside the mall, all shining and noisy and new, I wandered into one of the shoe stores. There were Nikes and Adidas, and, to my surprise, the same slippers I’d seen earlier. I asked the salesman the price.

“Ten dinars.”

“Why are they so expensive?”

My cousin looked agitated. The salesman launched into an explanation of why the slippers deserved such a price. But I wanted to say my piece. “Just so you know, I found these same slippers in the El-Hussein refugee camp for two dinars.”

Muhammad abruptly walked away.

I followed Muhammad outside the mall and into a taxi. He refused to look at me and wanted me to sit in the front of the cab. Although I could guess the answer, I asked him, “What’s the matter with you? Why are you so angry?”

“How could you embarrass us like that—telling him we were at the refugee camp, shopping? They might think we lived there! They’ll talk!” He glared at me.

“I don’t care what they think or what you think. It is where my father grew up.”

He kept quiet, still fuming as the taxi took us through the narrow, congested streets, all the way to his home in a nicer middleclass neighbourhood of the city.

When we arrived home, Muhammad stormed inside. His mother asked me what had happened. I told her the story, and she laughed at his reaction. But Muhammad’s sister and brother quickly stepped in to defend him, trying to explain how important status is in their culture and how people are judged by where they shop and who they know.

“Here, people care a lot about our historical roots, you know!” they said. And it is true. Everyone we met always asked about our lineage, right up to my great-great grandparents. Such knowledge doesn’t define how people see you, but it does give them a context within which to place you and your family. In other words, if my lineage revealed that my grandparents were collaborating with the Israelis or the English, that label would haunt me for generations. Since almost all Palestinians in Jordan started off living in the refugee camps, and those who made it out of the camps are regarded as successful and affluent. Only the poor and miserable remain in the camps. I did not fully appreciate at the time how my actions could affect my family who lived in Amman.

“The issue isn’t Jordanian culture,” I retorted. “It’s your own shame at being associated with the refugee camp. But your father and mother lived there, and some of you were actually born and grew up there.”

They were furious.

As I thought about my response to Muhammad’s behaviour, I realized that I had been arrogant and insensitive. I had forgotten what I knew about life in a refugee camp, about the way it stains your life. “Nothing could be more precarious than that—maybe one day you will understand it, the kind of place I grew up in,” Uncle Faisal once told me, and my father had said similar things over the years. Had Uncle Faisal not helped my family move to Canada, I would have been just like my cousins, living in shame not far from the ghetto of their past, and struggling to hold their heads high. While I visited my family in Jordan and spent time in Palestine, I gradually came to understand that to be Palestinian is to constantly feel displaced, yearning for a place to call home. It is to admit to an identity compromised by loss.